Youth today speak nonsense when they should be working, contradict their parents, guzzle their food and put their feet up on the table.
They have bad manners, contempt for authority and no respect for older people.
Socrates 500 BC A friend was talking about his teenage son.
He was concerned about some of the young man's social activities and his attitude towards employment and responsibility.
Another parent listening to this litany of worry, gently reminded the complaining Dad that he should try to remember what he had been like at the same age.
"That's what scares me" the father replied.
As parents we have this utopian dream that by some miracle our sons and daughters will reach maturity without engaging in the unorthodox activities or exhibiting the radical behaviors we did during our teen years.
Surely our children will somehow circumvent that difficult period of questioning their parents' values and contradicting their elders' every opinion the way we did when we were their age.
We think there must be some way to ease the transition into adulthood for our kids, when quite possibly a bit of a rocky sail towards becoming a grown up, is a rite of passage every young person needs to navigate.
My oldest son has a theory about this.
He says everyone goes through a time of rebellion in their life.
It might be when they are fourteen or fifteen or in their early twenties.
Perhaps if they escape those more common time periods of independent revolt, they may engage in a kind of rebellion at age forty or fifty.
My son figures the sooner you rebel the better.
You probably do the least damage to your future if you get that "challenging the socially accepted boundaries" phase over when you're as young as possible.
He's observed men and women jeopardize their chances for university degrees or good jobs by engaging in their rebellion in their twenties.
I've seen adults ruin their careers, marriages and families by "cutting loose" in their forties and fifties.
If my son's premise is true than we shouldn't be scared if our teenagers are behaving in a radical manner which doesn't exactly meet with our approval.
We did the same thing at their age.
Like our own rebellion, perhaps theirs is normal and healthy and might even help prevent a more dangerous type of revolt later on in their lives.
Recently I came across some letters I had written to friends when I was eighteen and nineteen.
I was embarrassed.
Had I really been so immature? I couldn't believe some of the ridiculous and shocking things I had said.
All of a sudden the teenagers I knew seemed pretty responsible and well adjusted.
Parents shouldn't feel too badly if they're struggling to accept their teenagers' experimental, unorthodox phase.
Even an intellectual giant like Socrates seems to have forgotten he was young once too.
Remembering what we were like as teenagers may be scary, but at the same time helpful.
Hopefully looking back to our own youth will not only make us more understanding of our children, but also more appreciative of our mothers and fathers.
Somehow they weathered those rebellious storms of ours.
If they could do it maybe we can too.
After all look how well we turned out!
They have bad manners, contempt for authority and no respect for older people.
Socrates 500 BC A friend was talking about his teenage son.
He was concerned about some of the young man's social activities and his attitude towards employment and responsibility.
Another parent listening to this litany of worry, gently reminded the complaining Dad that he should try to remember what he had been like at the same age.
"That's what scares me" the father replied.
As parents we have this utopian dream that by some miracle our sons and daughters will reach maturity without engaging in the unorthodox activities or exhibiting the radical behaviors we did during our teen years.
Surely our children will somehow circumvent that difficult period of questioning their parents' values and contradicting their elders' every opinion the way we did when we were their age.
We think there must be some way to ease the transition into adulthood for our kids, when quite possibly a bit of a rocky sail towards becoming a grown up, is a rite of passage every young person needs to navigate.
My oldest son has a theory about this.
He says everyone goes through a time of rebellion in their life.
It might be when they are fourteen or fifteen or in their early twenties.
Perhaps if they escape those more common time periods of independent revolt, they may engage in a kind of rebellion at age forty or fifty.
My son figures the sooner you rebel the better.
You probably do the least damage to your future if you get that "challenging the socially accepted boundaries" phase over when you're as young as possible.
He's observed men and women jeopardize their chances for university degrees or good jobs by engaging in their rebellion in their twenties.
I've seen adults ruin their careers, marriages and families by "cutting loose" in their forties and fifties.
If my son's premise is true than we shouldn't be scared if our teenagers are behaving in a radical manner which doesn't exactly meet with our approval.
We did the same thing at their age.
Like our own rebellion, perhaps theirs is normal and healthy and might even help prevent a more dangerous type of revolt later on in their lives.
Recently I came across some letters I had written to friends when I was eighteen and nineteen.
I was embarrassed.
Had I really been so immature? I couldn't believe some of the ridiculous and shocking things I had said.
All of a sudden the teenagers I knew seemed pretty responsible and well adjusted.
Parents shouldn't feel too badly if they're struggling to accept their teenagers' experimental, unorthodox phase.
Even an intellectual giant like Socrates seems to have forgotten he was young once too.
Remembering what we were like as teenagers may be scary, but at the same time helpful.
Hopefully looking back to our own youth will not only make us more understanding of our children, but also more appreciative of our mothers and fathers.
Somehow they weathered those rebellious storms of ours.
If they could do it maybe we can too.
After all look how well we turned out!